Five national park sites you may not know, each tied to President Garfield

When people hear "national parks," they think of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, but the National Park Service also holds hundreds of sites that tell the history of people and places. A ranger at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site wrote this tour of five lesser-known ones, each connected in some way to Garfield. The source gives two counts of park service sites that do not agree, so none is quoted here.

The Park Service uses special designations for history and culture sites: National Battlefields (Antietam, Fort Necessity), National Battlefield Parks (Manassas, Richmond), the National Battlefield Site at Brice Cross Roads, National Military Parks (Gettysburg, Shiloh), National Historical Parks (Abraham Lincoln Birthplace, Dayton Aviation Heritage), National Historic Sites (Garfield's own, and Brown v. Board of Education), the International Historic Site at Saint Croix Island, National Memorials (Arlington House, Flight 93) and National Monuments (Aztec Ruins, George Washington Birthplace).

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. NPS photo.

Edgar Allan Poe, Philadelphia

The site preserves the home Poe rented from 1843 to 1844, a period of his most prolific work. The story The Black Cat was inspired by the home's basement. Garfield mentioned The Raven briefly in his diary and owned two volumes of Poe's works, now on the shelves of the Memorial Library.

Longfellow House Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts. NPS photo.

Longfellow House, Cambridge

This was the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the world's foremost 19th-century poets, and it was also General George Washington's headquarters during the Siege of Boston, from July 1775 to April 1776. On New Year's Eve 1852, Garfield recorded in his diary that he read Longfellow's "Hymn to the Closing Year."

Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire. NPS photo.

Saint-Gaudens, Cornish, New Hampshire

Augustus Saint-Gaudens created over 150 works, from cameos to heroic-size public monuments, among them Standing Lincoln and the 1907 Twenty Dollar Gold Piece, which the article calls America's most beautiful coin. He also sculpted the Garfield death mask displayed in the Garfield visitor center. The site keeps Aspet, his home, galleries of his work, gardens and over 100 acres of forested grounds with nature trails.

Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, Hyde Park, New York. NPS photo.

Vanderbilt Mansion, Hyde Park, New York

The mansion's interior invites a guess at where Lucretia Garfield might have taken the expansion of the Garfield home after the President's death. It was built about ten years after that nine-room expansion (1884 to 1886) and represents the world of an American millionaire in the Gilded Age. The Park Service established it as a monument to an era, not a tribute to one family. The site has 211 acres with trails, centuries-old tree plantings, views of the Hudson River and the Catskills, and Italian gardens.

Clara Barton National Historic Site, Glen Echo, Maryland. NPS photo.

Clara Barton, Glen Echo, Maryland

The site preserves the home of the founder of the American Red Cross, who lived there from 1897 to 1912. The article says that in 1881, as Garfield lay incapacitated by an assassin's bullet, he signed a treaty allowing Barton and the International Red Cross to establish a national organization in the United States. The site covers the last fifteen years of her life and her accomplishments in personal medical care.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "More to Explore at Your National Parks", a ranger's post for the site's newsletter written in November 2014, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/more-to-explore-at-your-national-parks.htm; rewritten in hubnx's own words.